Microsoft is employing dark patterns to goad users into paying for storage? (lzon.ca)

by jpmitchell 245 comments 395 points
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245 comments

[−] deckar01 35d ago
Microsoft used to have an app called Office Lens. It helped color correct and keystone adjust documents scanned with a phone camera. They pushed an update that gutted the app and said this app has been replaced by OneDrive. After installing OneDrive and dodging multiple dark pattern storage upsells, I discovered the OneDrive app doesn’t have any of the document scanning tools. I’m sure someone got a bonus for increasing OneDrive installs though.
[−] sjs7007 35d ago
I got caught up in that too. Install OneDrive and saw you can't use it without signing up. I bailed right that.

Now admittedly my workaround ended up being uh... Google Drive.

[−] a2128 34d ago
I've since replaced Office Lens with FairScan. Usually it's the case that the big tech proprietary software is extremely streamlined while the open-source alternative is janky and confusing, but in this case it seems Microsoft's greed has flipped this completely upside down

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.fairscan.app/

[−] mandeepj 35d ago

> I discovered the OneDrive app doesn’t have any of the document scanning tools.

Loved office lens! The closets thing they have now is - + icon and Document.

[−] thombles 35d ago
It doesn’t? I use the OneDrive app for scanning documents all the time. + button then “Capture”
[−] deckar01 35d ago
Oh, I have to use their app to take the pic. I can’t use my existing photos anymore.
[−] theolivenbaum 35d ago
It's worse than that - the feature exists in the paid OneDrive app, it lets you scan, edit, add pages etc just like the office lens. It just doesn't save the output - scanned files just disappear in the void.
[−] j16sdiz 35d ago
What do you meant?

A quick search on youtube give me many short showing this function in OneDrive app.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/YT9EmGCpRxk

[−] laserlight 35d ago
Wow. This is news to me. Office Lens had been my trusted scanning app for ten years. It was years ahead of Cam Scanner bullshit, which many people used, likely because of marketing.
[−] ahartmetz 35d ago
What the fuck. I dodged a bullet by deciding to try a FOSS scanning app at F-Droid's suggestion (whose timing may not have been accidental). The trapeze correction of FairScan is not great... but it's not going to try to pull any crap on me, and if the app changes, it's probably for the better.
[−] Frieren 35d ago
Unregulated capitalism descents into scams and fraud. Why better your products and services when it is possible to buy competitors, increase prices and lie?

We need judges and policymakers that punish harshly this behavior and force companies to compete in quality and price instead of lies and competition elimination.

[−] timpera 35d ago
The "OneDrive" app definitely has a nice document scanning tool.
[−] kn100 36d ago
I got caught out by exactly this, and I'm not exactly tech illiterate. what made it even more annoying is by the time I'd realised what had happened, it was practically impossible to get the files back out of OneDrive (since I decided that this was enough Windows for me, and went back to Linux), since the webui does NOT handle downloading lots of small files well, and you just end up getting a partially complete zip file. I gave up in the end as nothing in there was particularly important. This is an incredibly annoying default.
[−] cromka 36d ago
I had same exact experience with macOS and iCloud. macOS by default enables offloading Documents to cloud, transparently. Problem is if you try to get those files back to store them offline, it gets very tricky very quickly with ambiguous verbiage and lengthy process that you never actually know status of. I ended up losing some files as a result, which came as a total shock to me. I was already in the process of moving back to Linux (hence downloading of the Documents) and this was final straw.
[−] shmoogy 35d ago
This is very annoying, but there’s a right click and force keep downloaded that reflags the folder and all items within it.
[−] Orygin 35d ago
Wdym, I never had any semblance of iCloud offloading my documents to the cloud?

Are you all clicking "yes" on every prompt you see? So many people saying MacOS does this or that, but these are never the default behavior on a fresh install.

[−] mikelitoris 35d ago
The vagueness is by design, it’s another dark pattern. “Delete all photos from icloud? [are we gonna delete the ones that we only keep compressed versions on your phone? Iono ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, you wanna find out? Yea, didn’t think so...]”
[−] lostlogin 35d ago
These is some weird bs there and it automagically sends everything up.

Despite stuff being placed on the drive, it decides to upload them and only have a cloud copy. I thought maybe it was me that caused this, then it happened to a family member overnight.

It’s painful.

[−] kn100 36d ago
Oh and another fun thing! I eventually just emptied the OneDrive so Microsoft would stop bothering me. This was maybe six months ago or so. Microsoft confirms I am storing nothing there. Just a week or two ago I got yet another email begging for money because my OneDrive was apparently full. It was a genuine email, I went as far as checking the headers for SPF/DKIM. When I signed into onedrive, still empty!
[−] lumiukko 36d ago
I wouldn't use the webui for that. Getting rid of onedrive in favor for a self-hosted nextcloud, I used the native client to download all the files on the machine and then moved them out. This also removed them from onedrive after acknowledging the "A lot of files have been deleted from your onedrive account" warning. Actually deleting the onedrive application was also not as straight-forward as some other users may want you to believe. Even now, I'm not sure it won't just pop-up one day once again.
[−] tracker1 35d ago
I setup cloud sync on my nas to sync my dropbox, google and onedrive accounts... I only have dropbox actually installed anymore as it's just what I mostly use.

I mostly tend to keep some important information synced to the others, for multi-access in case of emergency. I also have a bitwarden account for secrets.

I have a grandfathered outlook.com custom account that I still use for MS stuff on occasion, but I switched off windows for my personal use a few years ago now, when they put ads in the start menu search on insiders.

[−] jasonkester 35d ago
From their point of view, that's the product working correctly. The whole point of all these consumer cloud storage products is to make it easy to upload your stuff and impossible to download it. (impossible - 1u to be precise, for legal purposes).

iPhoto does this the best. Its default is to upload every one of your photos to its cloud and delete the original from your phone. Then if you want it back, you can just click on the one photo you want and like magic, it's back on your phone. Want it on you PC? No problem. Open the web interface, click the one photo you want, and there's even a download button.

Want all your photos? Oh. Well, you can just click each one of them then click the download button.

I mean, sure, there's also this icloud app that will slowly download your entire photo collection into a single folder on your computer, slowing down the entire time before eventually grinding to a halt by the time it has put 10000 of your 250,000 photos into that folder. Of course, you can restart it, but it'll start again at the beginning.

But yeah, that's the business model. Put your stuff on the cloud, make it hard to get it back, charge you to keep it there.

[−] doubled112 36d ago
I wonder if rclone would have behaved any better than the web UI.
[−] Morromist 36d ago
I too have seen onedrive do this to people who aren't super-heavy computer users. Onedrive is a menace.
[−] fuzzy2 35d ago
rclone supposedly supports transferring files from and to OneDrive.
[−] rcxdude 36d ago
What's also irritating is that onedrive will use some kind of 'smart' caching system to delete the local copy of a file. Which is all fine and dandy until you need said file when you don't have an internet connection. Explaining this to users is very difficult, they just know that something broke and usually when it was very important.

(OK, what's even more stupid is IT departments who don't understand that onedrive has any problems at all, and insist on it and refuse to set up an actual backup system for user devices because 'onedrive will back everything up')

[−] geophile 36d ago
From perusing reddit, I see some Windows users tempted to consider Linux, often because of Windows 11. But then, many of them won't move because: it doesn't work just like Windows; there is some Windows application they must have, or maybe they just don't want to learn the alternatives. Or they use word/excel/powerpoint and have to interact with others who do also.

The brainwashing, high tolerance for pain and misery (and expense!), and lock-in makes it close to impossible for ordinary computer users to escape.

[−] sakesun 35d ago
Not just storage expense. Recently I work extensively for a very large financial institute. They provide me with Windows terminal to work on the project. I initially expected to myself to work on a very institutional security constrained environment. Instead, the workspace keep popping up with annoying msn Ads inadvertently, out of any context. The default browser, Edge, was default to msn, which is full of more distracting Ads. They trick corporate users to be their Ads viewers using their trustworthy image in enterprise IT. No idea why they think that revenue would worth the downsides.
[−] seemaze 35d ago
So I never saw the 2020 series Space Force. But this clip[0] about Windows updates just happened into one of my feeds today and I was physically bowled over laughing. I must have watched it a half dozen times in rapid succession.

I suspect I'm just one of today's lucky 10,000 and everyone else here is already in on the joke, but I can't not share.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k899IiwP-iw

[−] liendolucas 36d ago
From the WinUtil screenshots presented in the article I'm absolutely shocked about all the things that you presumably want to turn off or delete to have a "clean" Windows (to some extent if that's possible at all). It's also ridiculous that you need an external tool to easily disable/remove/uninstall every single thing you don't want .

I haven't used Windows since many many years ago and the few times I sit down to interact with someone else's computer I suffer so much that after a few seconds I simply give up, I can't stand anything about it.

If someone were to use Windows, besides WinUtil, are there a set of recommended open source scripts to clean up all the shit out of a fresh Windows installation?

Just to be aware in case of emergency or extreme need...

[−] _wire_ 36d ago
Anytime any device in any context greets you with "Hello" or "Welcome", it is announcing that it doesn't belong to you, and that you must be vigilant to its exploitation of you.

Windows is remarkable in that it is constantly editing itself, revising terms of service without notice, nudging, cajoling, and end-running you and at every turn.

Update cannot be stopped, yet updater messages make it seem like you are initiating work and responsible for its successful completion:

"You're 90% there...",

"Don't turn off your PC",

"Something didn't go as planned, don't worry your data is safe",

which is eternally followed by "Welcome" lets arrange a few things...

Apple's dark patterns are far lower key as they supply the total stack, it's feels more custodial.

Linux if it says anything-- which it usually doesn't say much-- will say these changes are well-known to wreck things but you're at our mercy, them your system is put into some polluted state associated with a bygone era and all your config and data is your problem hope you're skilled at IT.

[−] asdefghyk 36d ago
I'm surprised their has not been a class action here, about how ( unskilled , mainly ) people are tricked? / Forced ? into using cloud storage.
[−] joshstrange 35d ago
I'm shocked that I can't find a single top-level comment that understands that the general public does not back up their data. We can call OneDrive a dark pattern or saving customer's butts from themselves. If it wasn't the default: "What do you mean all my pictures are gone forever because I never turned on OneDrive?".

I have no love for Microsoft but I'm having a really hard time seeing how it isn't the smart default to backup the user's files/photos to the cloud. Sure, if you are here on HN then maybe you have NextCloud, Immich, Dropbox, Google Drive/Photos, etc, that you make sure to backup your pictures to. I can assure you the general public does no such thing unless it's the default in the OS.

Try consoling a few people about how the pictures or files they hold dear are gone forever and then come back and talk about this "dark pattern".

This blog post is somehow a success story? No, it's a ticking time bomb. Great, you free'd up space for email at the expense of un-protecting all his pictures/files. That's not a win.

The author gets _so close_ to the point but manages to miss it completely:

> but I suspect that he deleted files (including family photos) for which he had no other backup.

> I’m a computer nerd, and if you are reading this you probably are as well. We can change that setting ourselves without much thought, and we probably have backups of our important data in case recovery is necessary.

But they couldn't make 1 more tiny hop to "my neighbor will not manage backups and so these files are now at risk".

[−] rng-concern 35d ago
My wife ran into something similar to this. Microsoft changed the bucket that email attachments went into for quota purposes. She had a lot of emails with pictures attached, so was immediately above the new quota, and she stopped receiving emails.

This definitely puts a fire under one, as she had to quickly under pressure (as each day was missed emails), figure out which emails to keep/backup.

We signed her up for a new gmail immediately.

The experience was stressful. Very poor.

[−] jmcphers 36d ago
Google is no better. My family mostly uses iPhones, and on a big extended family vacation, I suggested we use Google Photos to create a shared album to document the trip. Everyone installed the Google Photos app on their iPhone so they could contribute... which resulted in all of them having their email accounts disabled.

What happened? Google Photos on the iPhone backs up all your photos by default, and, like Microsoft, Google "shares storage" between email and photos. The minute Google Photos was installed, it started backing up photos until the paltry free tier was reached, at which point it disabled the associated gmail account since it was "out of storage".

Talk about an anti-pattern; I spent a good chunk of time on that trip helping people get their storage back so they could send email again.

I'll never recommend Google Photos to anyone ever again.

[−] boh 35d ago
When you use your highly restricted/infosec encrusted enterprise Windows laptop and still see the Xbox App, you know Microsoft have lost all respect for their customers. Consumer laptops are just a pure sales distribution channel on top of an OS that can now barely handle spying on you, selling you things AND actually doing the thing you bought it for. The most eye-opening moment when you switch to Linux is that it takes as fast as you typing your password in to start using it. You realize just how much Microsoft has fundamentally compromised software and people are too used to it to assume computers aren't just slow by default.
[−] VerifiedReports 35d ago
To be fair (and I hate Microsoft, so it's painful), Microsoft is not alone here. Google and Apple perpetrate similar BS, with Google Drive being a major offender.
[−] ImPostingOnHN 36d ago
This is part of a broader, financialization-related push across the entire economy to convert one-time-purchase revenue into steady, predictable, ratchet-able recurring revenue.

As an added bonus for them, they can sell laptops with less storage (= fewer chips in this tight market) with the expectation that the customer will store everything in the cloud, with plenty of overage fees.

[−] brailsafe 36d ago
Apple also does this with iCloud storage and it's maddening, not easy to reconcile, and threatening to turn off.
[−] hsbauauvhabzb 36d ago
Recently I noticed autosave is not enabled by default on word, I clicked to enable and it prompted me to save to one drive as apparently that’s the only way to enable autosave, a feature which has been around since ~Word 2000.
[−] jcalvinowens 35d ago
I've been replacing old windows machines with raspberry pi fives for my extended family. They all love them!

The cost makes the biggest difference: everybody is resistant, but caves and tries it when I say it only costs $100.

[−] TheOtherHobbes 36d ago
I had a similar issue. I ended my O365 subscription. Outlook kept complaining I had exceeded my free storage, which surprised me because I've never used OneDrive for anything, and my email storage was well under the limit.

I deleted a ton of useless emails anyway, but that didn't fix the problem. Somehow I had more than 25 gigs of space being used on a cloud system I'd never used, tied to an email account which supposedly needed less than 500 Mb of storage.

Eventually after a lot of searching I discovered the magic page that gave me direct access to OneDrive's actual storage - which was not, somehow, the page that gave access to the files.

OneDrive was storing a lot of attachments, and deleting emails and clearing the trash didn't delete them.

Or something like that. Whatever the magic words were, I did eventually find them and fix the problem.

But it took a while, I had to resubscribe for free for a month to make it happen, there was a lot of confusing side information online suggesting I should open a ticket (good luck with that on a consumer account) and generally it Just Didn't Work.

I can imagine people resubscribing for another year just to make it all go away.

This has been my lifelong experience of Microsoft - shockingly poor, contemptuous, or downright stupid interface design, Kafka-esque indifference to the user experience, and constant unwanted friction and complication, around a suite of core consumer products that are mediocre to start with.

[−] Gazoche 35d ago
Not that it's any excuse, but Apple does something similar by saving your photos to iCloud and deleting them from your local storage without telling you.

I have seen the following scenario play out twice already:

- The free iCloud tier runs out of storage because of the photo backups

- Apple spams the user with warning notifications and emails and incentives to upgrade

- User sees that nonsense and decides they don't really need iCloud backups (sometimes they didn't even know it was on) and turn it off

- But oops, turns out iOS had "helpfully" removed the original photos from the local device to "save space", and now the photos are inaccessible

- User tries to turn iCloud back on to access their photos but iOS now refuses to do it because the account is out of storage space (but don't worry, you can still upgrade to a paid plan!)

- The photos are now held hostage by Apple

You can access the photos from the iCloud website, but the download interface is clunky because it is not made for mass exports. And in this age of smartphones and apps, how many people know this is even an option? When this happened to an elderly family member of mine, it was only sheer luck that he had his iCloud password written down somewhere and I was able to rescue his photos from Apple's jaws.

[−] albedoa 36d ago
This is some real title gore, and I don't know who is to blame. As it appears:

> Microsoft is employing dark patterns to goad users into paying for storage?

That Microsoft is employing dark patterns is neither surprising nor a question. Can you explain this gross departure from the actual title jpmitchell[1]? Here is the original for reference:

> How Microsoft abuses its users

This is much more interesting and accurate.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jpmitchell

[−] 0x_rs 36d ago
Google Photos does the same thing, aggressively prompting the user endlessly until they give in. A solution to that is disabling the malicious application and installing Google's Gallery app instead, that possesses no ransomware capability from what I've last heard of it. Make no mistake: Google and Microsoft know very well this behaviour will lead to people subscribing to services they have, for the most part, no use for. It is therefore explicitly by design, deceiving tech-illiterate people threatening to delete files they never meant to upload.
[−] ddtaylor 35d ago
Microsoft has been disrespecting their user base for a very long time now. This is not news. Stop giving them your money.
[−] aucisson_masque 36d ago

> Microsoft is actively hostile towards its users.

No shit.

And I see some of the same pattern with Apple now, for instance by default files on iOS get downloaded to the iCloud. And phone get backed up too, same as photos. It just happens that the free 5gb of iCloud storage is slightly not enough for all this shit, and you quickly get a pop up showing you that you must purchase an iCloud subscription.

I know that work because my mother almost fall for it.

[−] zb3 36d ago
Thanks to obsession over KPI and metrics in general, we can no longer trust big tech corporations. It seems they've forgotten WHY you actually want to play fair, they can no longer be trusted.

We need to teach non-technical people that in this reality, a scam might come directly from the real seemingly "reputable" company.

[−] JumpCrisscross 35d ago
Are the number of computers running Windows rising or falling? (Most curious for the U.S. and Europe.)
[−] rconti 36d ago
Office in the Mac is AWFUL about this.

By default, it saves to a OneDrive you never asked for and can never find. You can't permanently change the location of your saved documents-- just change it once, and the setting stays "forever", maybe, until a software update fucks it up for you again.

Auto-save is disabled if you're not using OneDrive.

Nobody asked for OneDrive. It makes it a goddamned nightmare to find your files. I was trying to make it easy for my partner to save their files to the same location every time, make it easy to find in the Finder, make it easy for mailing attachments. No such luck.

[−] tim-tday 36d ago
If you want to experience Microsoft dark patterns just install a fresh copy of windows. Last a checked there were seven adversarial prompts where they try to trick you into doing something they want but you don’t. Send us your usage data! (No) Sign in with an online account (I want a local account) And on and on.

Fuck those guys.

[−] worik 36d ago
Just replying to the headline: Well, duh! What do we expect?

Reading the article, I still feel the same way.

[−] thombles 35d ago
Microsoft could tone it down a bit (especially all the full screen harassment after windows updates) but I wonder how many casual users have had their bacon saved precisely because their documents and desktop got pushed to the cloud?
[−] carodgers 36d ago
I don't use Windows at home. What happens if you don't have Outlook but your personal local files still fill up OneDrive storage? Do you get error messages that files aren't being backed up? Are you unable to save files?
[−] cute_boi 36d ago
even if you remove one drive in next update it will be installed automatically.
[−] themafia 35d ago
Onedrive: "How would you like your files sorted?"

Me: "Can I do alphabetical and perhaps by creation time?"

Onedrive: "NO! Absolutely not! I will sort everything based on the last time you opened the document."

:|

[−] to11mtm 36d ago
I long ago learned to pay the 2$ a month or whatever the hell to just have 1TB of storage and remember to keep my user account drive small enough where I never hit the amount.
[−] bentobean 35d ago
MacOS does this as well, and it drives me nuts. No, I do not want files on my desktop to be synced to iCloud.
[−] stogot 36d ago
My tech illiterate family members fell for this Microsoft dark pattern. Revolting
[−] fhn 36d ago
you should see Outlook 365. constant nagging about adding the url as the default mailto. Constant nagging for feedback. Mail doesn't load at consistently. OneDrive is just as bad.
[−] legitster 36d ago
We've really got to stop calling every bad UI a dark pattern. "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence." Having worked at MSFT I can tell you there's a LOT more incompetence than malice.
[−] mdavidn 36d ago
I recently helped my mother-in-law configure a new Windows 11 laptop. I knew Microsoft did this, I was deliberately looking to avoid OneDrive, and it _still_ burned me. It silently uploaded all of her personal documents that I had transferred from an older computer. I was livid.

Microsoft has permanently lost me as a customer. Every friend and family member who listens will upgrade to something else.

[−] 1vuio0pswjnm7 35d ago
Actual title: How Microsoft abuses its users
[−] 1116574 36d ago
This has been default experience for "normies" for quite some time now. Same for Google gallery which syncs to gdrive.

Just today we had a guy who got similar messages from one drive as one in the blogpost, and made the mistake of asking chatgpt about it. After renaming, moving, deleting and even doing regedit as llm instructef, some of the files went missing, some we managed to find.

Few weeks ago I had to explain over the phone how to setup windows without ms account, and we had to resort to turning off WiFi in the house lmao

[−] vaughands 35d ago
I see a lot of hate for Google in this thread but at least one thing they do well: it's really easy to fix. Takeout actually works. You can just download your photos and leave. As the top post identified here, Microsoft makes this a REAL pain to leave after they snared you.
[−] vachina 35d ago
If you think this is egregious wait till you experience Apple products.
[−] Bratmon 36d ago
Email scammers often make their initial emails intentionally full of red flags to automatically filter out anyone smart enough to avoid the scam, and leave them with a pool of people willing to accept any amount of scummyness and abuse.

Windows is the exact same thing but for operating systems. If you're still using it in 2026, it's because you want to be a mark.

[−] hansmayer 35d ago
Well, colour me surprised :)
[−] selectively 36d ago
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